Developer interview on Hash Power

On September 23, Hash Power published an interview with the Zycord developer. The answers are reproduced here as given; the original is on hashpower.site.

Where are you from and what’s your background?

I’m an anonymous developer, so I’ll talk about the project rather than about myself. What I can say is that I spent many years building software, most of it in blockchain. I’ve worked with several networks like Ethereum, Solana, Sui, Polygon, Gnosis and also with private chains like Hyperledger. Seeing that many different architectures from the inside is what brought me here.

What made you start this project, and how long have you been working on it?

There’s one thing that always bothered me. Ethereum’s original pitch was to be a decentralized computer, but what we actually built is a computer where everyone is forced to execute exactly the same thing at the same time. In practice, it’s the most expensive computer in the world, it does very few operations, and it burns an absurd amount of energy doing them.

My question was always: how do I make it so that every node joining the network makes it more efficient, instead of just repeating everyone else’s work? And how do I make sure everyone who participates is well paid for it? I chewed on that for years, ever since I started working with blockchain. For the last three years I’ve been working on it consistently, and after a lot of study and a lot of stubbornness I arrived at the Zycord design.

What’s funny is that when I started, almost nobody was talking about this. Now the market is starting to look in that direction like Polygon, for example, approved PIP-72 last year, for stateless block verification. It’s a sign that people are realizing execution efficiency is what actually brings costs down.

On the launch: I would have loved to start in Proof of Stake, but doing a launch to raise money doesn’t sit well with me. So I went with Proof of Work and a migration to Proof of Stake, it gives you a fair distribution up front and an energy-efficient network afterward.

What’s your vision for this project?

Zycord works with two gas markets: one for writing to the chain, and one for processing transactions. That second one, the parallel market, is what gets me excited. It makes smart contracts with heavy processing genuinely cheap.

The market spent years looking only at TPS, TPS, TPS. But the real problem is the cost of executing logic on chain. Solve that and you unlock things that are unthinkable today: an entire game running inside the contract, not just trading NFTs, not just CryptoKitties, but the whole game logic on chain. Decentralized exchanges with real order books, which need far more storage and processing. Maybe even AI agents operating inside the ecosystem.

Every technological revolution works like this. Bitcoin enabled payments. Ethereum took those simple opcodes and layered if/else logic on top, still fairly limited. Zycord comes in to enable genuinely complex applications. It’s another disruption of the blockchain model.

Where do you see this project going in the next 5 years?

I’ll keep working behind the scenes. But the landscape has changed: with AI, building software got much faster and cheaper, so I expect a lot of projects to show up in the ecosystem, validating this thesis and showing the market that you can build genuinely interesting things here.

Five years out, I imagine the project with all its phases complete: the network on Proof of Stake, confidential payments live, plenty of applications running. And honestly, I see Zycord in the CoinMarketCap top 100.

Is there anything else you’d like people to know? What really sets this apart?

First, something I like to make clear: Zycord didn’t invent any new technology. It takes what already exists and uses the best of each.

Think about what a mining node does today: it orders, it executes, it resolves conflicts, it validates blocks, it validates transactions, it coordinates everything. And all of that has to fit inside a tiny block time, if my block is every 10 seconds, all the execution for all the transactions has to happen in there, sequentially. That’s why running smart contracts is expensive. But most of those jobs don’t need to be decentralized at all.

Web2 spent decades solving exactly this problem, real-time state transitions across many participants, and has very good solutions, already proven in production. Web3’s problems are recent from an engineering standpoint. So what I did was separate them: what’s Web2 goes to Web2, and what’s truly Web3, the ledger, the only thing that genuinely has to be decentralized, stays Web3, with all the security that requires. That gives you an absurdly larger scale and a far lower cost than any other blockchain, without giving up reliability.

The second differentiator is the dual gas market, which separates what’s scarce (writing to the ledger) from what’s abundant (verification). Want an example of what that unlocks? Quantum computers will keep advancing over the coming decades, and at some point we’ll have to swap our algorithms for new ones that are computationally heavy. On Zycord that fits with no drama, because heavy cryptography runs in the cheap market.

I also want to be honest about the limits. When we say the protocol reaches a million transactions per second, what we’re saying is that Zycord solved blockchain’s scaling problem. What nobody solves in software is two things: storage and network bandwidth. Those are physical limits. But they improve year after year, and the network was designed to grow with the hardware: it starts at 90 transactions per second and the protocol itself raises that as demand grows, no fork, no vote, no one intervening. Twenty years from now it’s still current, because it moves with the hardware of twenty years from now.

The real insight, in the end, is this: we built a network with no bottlenecks. The only limits left are the ones the physical world imposes and those we’ve already mapped.